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Comment by beefhash | Hacker News Reader

I think my favorite (in terms of humor) is a commit from mpv complaining about locales and encodings. You can practically feel the committer's sheer frustration.

[1] https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/commit/1e70e82baa9193f6f02...

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Final paragraph:

> All in all, I believe this proves that software developers as a whole and as a culture produce worse results than drug addicted butt fucked monkeys randomly hacking on typewriters while inhaling the fumes of a radioactive dumpster fire fueled by chinese platsic toys for children and Elton John/Justin Bieber crossover CDs for all eternity.

I also nominate this commit.

Pure, rage-filled, git commits are possibly the most honest form of art.

It's where the commit message comes in the process that makes them noteworthy. They're the final chance for a developer to vent their spleen or blow their trumpet before signing off on the results of possibly days of work.

George Carlin would probably approve and applaud.

Also from the commit message:

> like Shift JIS (sometimes called SHIT JIZZ)

Back then when I was working for a Japanese outsourced project, the code won't compile unless the computer's locale was set to Japanese because the C code had comments in Shift JIS.

My favorite (in terms of dark humor, if we’re honest) is YOLO, one of the more interesting deep learning object detectors. [1] It is the exact opposite of yours in every way. The code is brilliant however.

Even the papers are snarky. [2]

[1] https://github.com/pjreddie/darknet/commits/master

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.02767.pdf

> But maybe a better question is: “What are we going to do with these detectors now that we have them?” A lot of the people doing this research are at Google and Facebook.I guess at least we know the technology is in good hands and definitely won’t be used to harvest your personal information and sell it to.... wait, you’re saying that’s exactly what it will be used for?? Oh.

> Well the other people heavily funding vision research are the military and they’ve never done anything horrible like killing lots of people with new technology oh wait.....

> The author is funded by the Office of Naval Research and Google.

He's being funded for this. This is fantastic.

https://pjreddie.com/darknet/yolo/

https://pjreddie.com/static/Redmon%20Resume.pdf

This is the kind of guy I'd love to hang out with.

That resume is something else.

i'm all for adding an artistic flare to set your resume apart from others... but that's a bold move, cotton.

It's not about trying to catch attention, it's saying "I'm so good that even though this is totally unprofessional you're still going to want me"

It's the resume equivalent of Culture ships with silly names/AI personas.

At a certain level, it's boring to just be good. The interesting challenge becomes to stay good while being silly as fuck.

And that's why I'm serious and professional.

...you're going to want me...kept away from others due to HR cringing at my presence.

You're not filtering him out of the hiring pool, he's filtering you. ;)

Yeah, my own resume isn't (or wasn't, it has been years since i updated it) that flair-y, but it does have a sidebar with screenshots of stuff i worked on (with my face doing a weird look at the top) and is in mostly prose style with bold text for each of the projects i worked on (bold helps to scan for stuff, at least that was the idea). I've been told a few times (by friends) that this isn't how resumes are supposed to look like but my line of thinking is that if you are so stuck up that you want a specific format for a resume, then you're most likely too stuck up for me to want to work with you :-P.

My team is in a full-on hiring spree right now. I've opted out of it because there's no process.

Ultimately, it boils down to people's gut feelings, which is so disgustingly random.

The real WTF is: Apparently there is a place called "Unalaska" in Alaska!

My understanding is that the in the local language "Alaska" means "Peninsula," and "Unalaska" means "Near the peninsula."

I was reading it and kind of interested, and thought this line was funny:

> I have a lot of hope that most of the people using computer vision are just doing happy, good stuff with it, like [...] tracking their cat as it wanders around their house

And then suddenly realized I've wanted to do exactly that for a long time. Well... specifically install a camera that can detect my cat on the counter (and not my hands doing stuff) and sound an alarm/puff air to get him off.

Could this work for that? I think it could! I know my winter project...

On the topic of cats vs automation, I'd recommend reading this post [1] describing the arms race created by the writer's cat attempting to break into an automated feeding machine. HN discussion here [2]

[1] http://quinndunki.com/blondihacks/?p=3023 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13230904

We had an automated feeder with two chambers, each held down by a rotating, ticking timer switch. You rotate the switch to, say, 12 hours in the future, and 12 hours later the slot lines up and the lid pops over.

After many months, my cat learned to stand on top of the lid and use both paws to rotate the switch forward until the lid popped open.

This blew my mind. The switch was separated from the lid. I could imagine the cat attacking the lid itself, but this separate mechanism, requiring a motion completely distinct from the motion of an opening lid, and requiring patience without instantaneous reward or even evidence that it was going to work.... I just couldn't believe it.

Never underestimate captive animals (or humans). They have nothing but time to observe your patterns of behavior and learn from them...

There are few tech stories I enjoy more than the back-and-forth of breaking and improving a thing. A story where one side of the conflict is a cat means this might be my new favorite!

I've had good luck using low tech puzzle feeders with my cats. Each one is a bowl with a maze inside or a tower with various windows and trap doors they need to work the food out of to be able to eat. As the food levels get lower the pieces get harder to reach, which allows their laziness to take over and stop them from eating too much.

One example: https://sep.yimg.com/ay/entirelypets/kyjen-dog-games-slo-bow...

I love how he just randomly carries on his own internal dialog in his writing as if he really just doesn't give a fuck who's reading it. Totally brilliant!

I really like his licensing model, specially the META license: https://github.com/pjreddie/darknet/blob/master/LICENSE.meta

> 4. Things We Tried That Didn’t Work

I love seeing a section like this when reviewing a paper. I really wish more authors would include one. (Goodness knows I've chased down enough dead-ends in some of my own research efforts.)

Yeah, it's fun, but, seriously, git log is messy AF. I wouldn't appreciate it a bit, if somebody would do that to a project I'm involved in.

What's funny, though, the paper (written in a pretty much the same "fuck you" manner) is much more readable and informative than the average. Which says a lot about science papers out there.

Number 2 might be the greatest technical paper I've ever read. Brilliant :D

Oh. Locales. The remembered pain.

Save a file in Notepad. Open in vi. See that it is different. Find data in the database, no clue the weird characters were originally supposed to be. And so on and so forth.

I once wrote a reasonable program and sent it as a bug report to the maintainer of the Perl module DBD::File. He sent it as a bug report to BerkeleyDB. They said they never thought about it but yes, that would be silent data corruption with no way to recover. The program? Maintain an address book in a BTree sorted in the current locale. Enter names. Change locale and insert something else. Voila! Lost data with no way to recover!

> Oh. Locales. The remembered pain.

More like the ongoing pain.

I had to write the following just this year because SQL Server still defaults to using CP 1252 for text. The culprit? One of those damned stylized quotes that Office loves to insert for you. The code:

    def _wrap_str(value: str):
        try:
            return SqlVarChar(
                value.encode("cp1252")
            )
        except UnicodeEncodeError:
            logging.getLogger("bulk copy").exception(f"value causing error: {value}")
            raise

I would call that Windows pain at this point, not locales.

In the Linux/Postgres world, everything is UTF-8. Which is the default for all internet protocols. Do that and the pain is gone.

Of course Windows doesn't do that...

Linux is not entirely UTF-8, though plenty of people treate it as if is so. Even if on Linux, you might need to consume files from other OS's or other Linux systems with different locales. Once had issues with systems configured with "C" locale vs "en-US" should have been near identical, but enough slight differences to cause failures. Been +10 years, so I dont remember the details.

Windows, the OS, is UTF-16 (or UCS-2 - I forget the details between the two), SQL Server has, for historical reasons, defaulted to CP1252, probably for compatibility with Office components.

But, it's not really a Windows problem, per se, because you have to deal with this issue if you deal with data originated from numerous Windows apps, even if on Linux. Yeah, you can insert a byte order mark (BOM) to indicate UTF-8, but most tools expecting UTF-8 actually dont check for the BOM and blow up in interesting ways if present. Ive seen this far too many times. Enough that anytime I see an encoding error from the likes of Python or Ruby, its an instant recognition (I do a lot ETL work from a number of vendors, so I see a lot of different files "types").

SQL Server prior to 2019 stores unicode data in UCS-2 (UTF-16 analog, rougly). SQL Server 2019 supports UTF-8.

Bugs in the C library string localisation have previously caused a problem in PostgreSQL as well:

https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Abbreviated_keys_glibc_issu...

Since Postgres 10 they use ICU instead of relying on the C library string routines to give more control.

https://www.2ndquadrant.com/en/blog/icu-support-postgresql-1...

That reminds me of the glorious https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:JIS_and_Shift-JIS_variant....

I have an Untagle game on my phone... is there an SVG editor that could do something similar?

I've found Graphviz / DOT to be surprisingly handy at times:

* https://www.graphviz.org/gallery/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT_(graph_description_languag...

"this is a simplified representation" :D

Wonder if there's some more ideal way to lay out those so they are less of a tangled web. This graph makes me want an adjacency list.

This needs to be REQUIRED READING at the Open Group and the ISO C standards committees.

I'll quibble just a bit and say that:

  a) the C locale should be a UTF-8 locale...
     that tolerates invalid sequences (because
     the C locale historically is a just-use-8
     locale),
  
  b) even with new functions that take a locale
     handle, we need functions that use a global
     one, however that global one should be set
     once and NEVER changed in the life of the
     process, and it should be set either before
     main() starts, or before main() does anything
     that needs a locale, or starts any threads.

> “Those not comfortable with toxic language should pretend this is a religious text.”

Not a commit but from the same author, so you may enjoy: https://github.com/wm4/dingleberry-os/blob/master/README.rst

It does go off on a few tangents, but it's an interesting read.

> Descent 2 custom level reviews

You weren't kidding about the tangents.

This message says much more about the author than it does about the commit.

Really? I would say 90% of the commit message is technical, rest is just emphasizing his frustration, which is pretty much justified. Yes, he is a person that seemingly gets pissed off by bullshit design decisions and whatnot. So?

Yeah. People who use the term "retarded" that way are stupid, no matter how smart they are.

I disagree. Words are just words and we give them meaning. Being derogatory and unkind to mentally deficient folks is ethically wrong. Using that word in a different context to communicate frustrating imo is fine.

Try telling that to my boss, who has an autistic child. I held your opinion until I stuffed my foot in my mouth in a meeting. Now I don't use that word.

There it is.

"When you omit courtesy you're throwing sand in the gears of a machine that doesn't work too well in the first place."

~Heinlein (I'm paraphrasing.)

There's no glory in being a boor, and no shame in being courteous.

None of this is news: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiquette#History

    A fool never learns,
    A man learns from his mistakes,
    A wise man learns from the mistakes of others.

Wait until a derogatory word being used effects you directly. It's really easy to just not use words flippantly that you know some people have an issue with. You are clearly aware of how it can be offensive and for a lot of people your definition is still just a callback to people being unkind about mental illness. History matters too and if you choose to ignore that and use it anyway you're just being unnecessarily inconsiderate.

I don't recommend you to join chats in competitive online games.

That may be so, but its active usage in one social group does not justify the discourtesy of its usage, especially in a professional setting.

Yeah, people are idiots. Incremental progress is better than nothing, though.

That is... wonderful. I've spent some time dealing with locales in C and other places that depend on the things being discussed in the commit. Just reading it bring back some of the rage I felt.

Agreed, that's an over the top commit message.

I do disagree with the assertion that it takes a lot of code to convert between the various UTF variants, 3 pages is an overestimate. https://stackoverflow.com/a/148766/5987

“mpv”, “sheer frustration”... I didn’t have to click the link to know it was authored by wm4.

This is why i stick with ASCII :-P.

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